My dad showed me this video yesterday, and after seeing it I knew that I had just experienced a resurgence of vitality ... and that my brain had just shot forward by a ... few light years. Now my father is an evangelist of the Web 2.0, and this video is dedicated to the same. If you are wondering what Web 2.0 is, here's the definition from the person who coined the term, Darcy DiNucci:
The Web we know now, which loads into a browser window in essentially static screenfuls, is only an embryo of the Web to come. The first glimmerings of Web 2.0 are beginning to appear, and we are just starting to see how that embryo might develop. ... The Web will be understood not as screenfuls of text and graphics but as a transport mechanism, the ether through which interactivity happens. It will [...] appear on your computer screen, [...] on your TV set [...] your car dashboard [...] your cell phone [...] hand-held game machines [...] and maybe even your microwave.
So what's so great in this, the sceptic will interject.
The great thing is ... the fact that ... Web 2.0 never ends. It is an eternal process of development, and ... everyone contributes to it, in some way or the other. A fine example is the popular Web 2.0 platform, wikipedia, an open source encyclopedia that relies only on its users for existence. the result? Well it's indeed not hard to seek, and has already rendered the gargantuan Encyclopaedia Britannica primitve. Indeed, why will someone pay thousands for a set of thirty-odd volumes or for a CD, when they have this even bigger freeware resource in their hands?
That, my dear friends is the greatness of Web 2.0. Look at the net king, Google. Their success is in fact, almost completely owing to their adaptabilty to Web 2.0! The ability to integrate the users of a system into the system is what Web 2.0 is all about, and Google has done just that, in the most extra-ordinary manner ... if you still need examples ... here's one more. Me writing in a Blogger blog, or you connecting with your friends on Orkut (or for that matter Facebook), is an example of us being a part of the system.
Cool eh? Even cooler is what I mentioned a few lines back ... Web 2.0 being a process of eternal devlopment. Here's an illustration. Remember your biology classes? The brain? The neurons? If you do, then let me ask you ... how do we learn?Simple, in principle, extraordinarily complex in actuality. But we are interested only in the principle for the time being, and here it is. For every iota of information we register in our brain, some connection is made somewhere ... say a connection between neuron number 56,736,210 connects with neuron number 17,384,950,032 ... that helps you remember that 2 + 3 = 5 and not 4 ... and all these connections which keep building eternally gives rise to the complicated thing called memory, and adds to our knowledge.
Similarly, every input from a user of the system adds to the overall knowledge and intelligence of the system, and the system slowly develops an attribute called intiution. The inputs from the users forge similar connections within the system. I writing in my post that "My Santro has been sold' lets the system know, that ... well ... my Santro has been sold, not the most ground-breaking happening perhaps, for the system to bother, but then again, it has indeed added to the overall knowledge of the system. This highlights an emergent property of the system: not that each of the inputs to it, matter, but the combined aggregate that can slowly lead us towadrs development, just as a single drop of water cannot flow, but a multitude can, and do more. This is, by far, the coolest aspect of Web 2.0, and the reason why Web 2.0 has indeed come to stay.
(The picture above shows a collection of Web 2.0 based platforms. How many are you a part of?)
After all this ... confusing jargon and high sounding words ... and blah blah blah ... here is the video which I mentioned in the first line. It's a pretty popular video from You Tube (yet another Web 2.0 based platform!), and you may have seen it.
Here goes:
(I dunno but I think something is wrong with my machine / browser / or template, the comments link in the first post sometimes does not seem to work. If you face the same problem, but a want to comment please click on the tiltle of this post and then click on 'post a comment' at the bottom)
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